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ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
DREAM-POP STILL CORNERS Strange Pleasures (Sub Pop) ●●●●● A pleasure for certain, but not an unexpected one. As much as it owed to the much-missed Broadcast, Still Corners’ 2011 debut Creatures of an Hour was such an auspiciously pretty arrival that it’s little wonder to find the London-based US/English boy-girl duo returning with
a follow-up of such immense beauty. Steeped in the chilly synths, crisp electronic drums and oceanic reverb of 80s pop so prevalent on today’s musical landscape, it’s like it never went out of fashion.
Records | MUSIC
FOLK THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE I Cannot Sing You Here, But for Songs of Where (Armellodie) ●●●●●
As you might suspect of an itinerant folk hoarder who takes his grisly nom de plume from the average weight of a dead man’s bones, Johnny Lamb appreciates the gravity of his songs. His third album, I Cannot Sing You Here . . . frames his original works and (mis)appropriated folklore within a conceptual paradigm of location and identity. It explores past place, the place of heritage, the present place and the
inbetween while traversing Shetland and Ireland, Cornwall and Kiel, taking in contributions from Hefner’s Darren Hayman, Le Reno Amps, Jen Macro (Something Beginning With L), Irish box player Seamus Harahan, and Laurence Collyer (The Diamond Family Archive) along the way. The album’s upbeat celtic folk knees-ups, like touring anti-climax ‘The Streets I Staggered Down’ are reminiscent of the Decemberists or a wayfaring Pogues, but the album’s real charms come in its windswept folk dirges (‘Veesik for the Broch’ is a great, troubling opener which channels traditional Shetland song, propelled on a drone constructed by a squeezebox and a boat building machine), and its disorientating sea shanties.
As only great pop will, from its steady motorik beat through Album highlight ‘The Ballad of Cootehill’ is an epic, gorgeous travelling ode
slipstream guitars, opener ‘The Trip’ couches cathartic feelings of escape in the language of a long drive. ‘Pack your bags, hit the open road,’ Tessa Murray breathily coos, her voice a dead-ringer for Alison Goldfrapp’s, as a glowing synth arpeggio flickers by like sodium lights. For an album hewn from a terrible break-up – ‘suicide, all that stuff’, comments songwriter/producer Greg Hughes dryly – it isn’t half heavenly at times. The glistening ‘Firelies’ could be M83 exercising unusual restraint, while ‘Beatcity’ – and this is true of much of the record – would have fitted neatly on the Drive soundtrack. It’s when they throttle down with ‘Going Back to Strange’, an eerily
peaceful postcard from ‘the brink’ set to choral oohs and deep synth drones, that Still Corners reveal this album’s finest moment. By ‘Midnight Drive' the key has turned minor, the mood darker and wearier, and the final destination seems a lot less certain. Strange Pleasures is a record – like Beach House’s Bloom in 2012, or Washed Out’s Within and Without in 2011 – destined to possess your summer: an endlessly rewarding listen for warm nights and journeys, stuck on repeat long after the days grow shorter again. (Malcolm Jack)
to seeking one’s roots and losing the ground beneath us, and the first of a fine triumvirate of songs. ‘Mother This Land Won’t Hold Me’ begins as an a cappella Sean Nós ballad, waltzes into chamber-pop, then breaks down into beatific distortion, while ‘The Snow In Kiel’ is as glacial and heavenly as its title. It underscores the album’s complex fascination with our sense of identity, place and home. ‘I can’t speak, and I’m not anywhere, I wish that I would sleep,’ Lamb beseeches as he speeds through Western European flatlands, catching glimpses of memories, people, places, land. ‘They pass me by,’ he sadly sings, yet little does. This is an often-lovely record about where we belong, and where we do not. (Nicola Meighan)
CONCEPTUAL POWER-POP NEON NEON Praxis Makes Perfect (LEX) ●●●●● SLOWCORE EAGLEOWL this silent year (Fence) ●●●●●
Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys has long loved turning strange biography into pop music that’s stranger still. With the Furries, he referenced Howard Marks, Che Guevara and Einstein’s parents, and on the 2008 Mercury- nominated Stainless Style (recorded as Neon Neon, alongside Boom Bip, aka American hip-hop producer Bryan Hollon), he gave us a concept album about maverick motoring miscreant John DeLorean.
The eccentric Welsh genius’ latest fascination, again under the Neon Neon umbrella, is Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the son of a wealthy Italian family turned rogue leftist publisher and militant. His socialist activism, book smuggling, basketball matches with communist leaders and suspicious death in 1972 become, like DeLorean’s antics, the subject of gleaming 80s-tastic power-pop in the hands of the ever-inventive Rhys and Hollon. ‘Dr. Zhivago’ turns the story of Feltrinelli sneaking pages from the banned
masterpiece out of the USSR into a work of high-sheen fantasy-pop befitting Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night. On the chipper ‘Hoops with Fidel’, we find him ‘bouncing ideas of joy’ on court with Cuba’s revolutionary head hombre. ‘Shopping (I Like To)’ makes emotionless robo-disco from the irony of there now being a huge chain of entertainment stores across Italy named in Feltrinelli’s honour, and features the vogue-ish voice of Sabrina Salerno – buxom 80s pin-up of ‘Boys’ fame. The propulsive electro-pop of ‘Mid Century Modern Nightmare’
Here are a few clues that this is a rare and unhurried debut album: it starts with a beat, and then the beat slows down; the instruments come in one by one; the opening words are ‘some other time’. The album’s centrepiece is in fact its penultimate song, ‘Too Late in the Day’, an orchestral, slowcore wig-out in excess of 12 minutes long. Oh, eagleowl! You were worth the wait. Here’s to your languorous chamber-pop, your making more with less, and your doing things right, not fast.
Eight years since their formation as a duo (singer-songwriter Bart Owl and violin
buccaneer Malcolm Benzie), then a trio (with double bassist Clarissa Cheong), eagleowl have gradually evolved into a swoon-inducing six-piece, thanks to organ/harmonium guy Rob St John (see our feature on his Folklore Tapes project, page 25), Hannah Shepherd (cello) and inestimable sticksman Owen Williams (drums). Following a couple of excellent EPs, their inaugural album, co- produced by FOUND whiz Tommy Perman, is sublime, expansive and timeless. You might compare their slow-release euphoria to Low or Dirty Three, but then you could also align their philharmonic indie psalms with hip-hop, in statement if not execution (‘eagleowl versus woodpigeon’ is a beatific, seasick rebuttal to the latter’s ‘Woodpigeon vs. Eagleowl’). Or you might discern Cliff Richard’s spectre on sexually-bereft pop lament, ‘It’s So Funny’. There is aching nostalgia (‘Summerschool’), lots of silence, distortion and exquisite humour: not just
proves the closest thing Praxis Makes Perfect has to equal Stainless Style’s irresistible lead single ‘I Told Her on Alderaan’. Our Italian anti-hero finally
checks out with ‘Ciao Feltrinelli’, as Rhys salutes a man whose 'ideas need no vessel' while knowingly cheesy bass and sax play, and actress Asia Argento reads from the biography that inspired this album. There ends a ridiculously enjoyable insight into the life of one intriguing character through the vision of another. (Malcolm Jack)
because the swansong is called ‘Laughter’ but because, after all of this time, it ends, prematurely. In many ways, eagleowl are true
to their moniker – enigmatic and wise, equally versed in patience, restraint and attack (there's rampant evidence on the searing ‘Too Late in the Day’). But let us not be shackled by zoomorphic accords, because eagleowl are also gorgeous pop tortoises: hard-working, enduring and quietly all-conquering. Slow and steady wins the race. (Nicola Meighan)
18 Apr–16 May 2013 THE LIST 77